This is the kind of engagement most nascent startups dream about, and Wander has managed to accomplish it without even launching a product — relying instead on a little wit.

Aside from some tongue-in-cheek encouragement such as "spread the word and rack up some serious points!" the page resembles those manufactured by a startup called LaunchRock, which builds beta launch pages for other startups.

LaunchRock pages don't promise points, but they do promise to give users early access in exchange for inviting friends to sign up.

"I don’t think that anyone actually believes that you actually get in faster by doing that," Wander founder Jeremy Fisher tells Mashable. "It's just a way to get users. We wanted to do something that kind of plays off that belief.”

The second phenomenon the site references is the reason for its massive point counts. In the corner of the page is a virtual cow that users can click to earn those meaningless points.

It's a nod to the Cow Clicker Facebook game, which was built by game developer Ian Bogost to highlight the pointlessness of Facebook games. The game became a hit that attracted tens of thousands of players.

"There's something pleasurable about clicking a cow," Bogost tells Mashable. "It's very strange. Don't ask me why. Of course, they're also participating in what is now apparently a kind of cultural experience, cow clicking."

As happened with Bogost's original Cow Clicker game, coders have built programs to automatically click the cow on Wander's launch page. One of these programs clicks the cow 10,000 times every second. In one day, clicks from Wander's page sent about 500 million clicks to its servers.

Meanwhile, there's been more than 3,000 mentions of Wander — whatever it is — on Twitter. The Wander Twitter account has 750 followers and a Klout score of 57.

With this kind of attention, we wouldn't be surprised if Launchrock started adding a cow to its pages, too. But Bogost, who created the cow, doesn't think its the driver of Wander's pre-launch success.

"I doubt it has any real effect, but it seems to offer a certain style, like wearing a particular kind of clothing," he says. "It's almost like cow clicking is a 'just add irony' tactic now."

Mashable
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